How “kill the pigs” became “only the police should have guns”

In the fabled 1960s, the cops were called pigs, and anybody on the political Left who wanted a ticket to the show knew that and mouthed it often.

At rallies, protests, and riots, people said: are the pigs here yet? I heard they were three blocks away. Wonder how many pigs they’re sending today? There! There they are! The pigs!

Now, on the Left, that tradition has morphed into: repeal the 2nd Amendment; turn in your guns; citizens with guns are satanic; the police will protect us; a private citizen with a gun is a killer and needs psychiatric lockdown; suspend that five-year old with the gun screen-saver.

What happened?

In 1968, if you asked a leftie college student whether a black man living in the inner city had a right to own a gun to protect himself against the cops, the answer, ten out of ten times, would have been yes.

Now, that leftie kid will be talking about the insanity of anybody owning a gun. Except for the cops.

Well, three things have happened since the 1960s. The end of the military draft, and the end of anybody caring who smokes pot or who has sex with who. Those changes melted away the whole “movement.”

A professor friend taught at UCLA during the turbulent 60s and early 70s. He told me as soon as the Vietnam war was over, the campus transformed in a flash. Students were suddenly all about finding a niche in the job market after graduation. Boom. Switch on, switch off.

The titanic idealism was put away in a drawer and filed under “crazy shit I did.”

The one remaining piece from the 60s that has endured is hatred of big corporations. But gradually, a parallel mindset has developed. First, grudging acceptance of big government; then toleration; then admiration.

Now, the Left is all about big government and the “positive changes” it can make.

And when I say the Left, I also mean the center, and a great deal of the right, because they’ve come along for the ride, too. They are the Left now.

In 1968, a big-time liberal presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, was the target of riots, by the Left, at the Democratic National Convention. Those riots tore apart half the city. Two years earlier, a march, by the Left, on the Century Plaza Hotel in LA, where Democratic President Lyndon Johnson was staying, sealed his fate. It was the last stone. Johnson, who had presided over the war on poverty and the creation of “The Great Society,” the biggest federal program since FDR’s New Deal, was mangled into oblivion.

Johnson announced he wouldn’t run for office again in 1968.

If Pelosi, Reid, Frank, and Obama had been around then, they would have been hammered in the same way by the Left. If they were for the war in Vietnam.

That was the big key, the war. Or to be precise, the military draft.

“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?!”

Meaning: “I won’t risk my neck going to Nam!”

The elite Left has become the personification of the soccer mom now. Worries about everything. Danger everywhere. Needs more helmets. Schedules more play dates. Wants more state surveillance. “If you’re against intrusion on your privacy, maybe you have something to hide.” “Keep the poor bottled up in inner cities, give them anything they want, just don’t let them into my neighborhood.”

The Left has also become the promise of a vague fairyland new age. “We’re all in this together.” “We can raise up the lowest among us (by printing more money).”

And the police are part of that fantasy. They’re the centurions at the gate. “Arm them to the teeth.” “Render the rest of us powerless.” That’s the grand solution to all our social ills. Naked, hairless, unarmed, watched around the clock, we’ll be beautifully safe, under the machine of a national police force.

You think I’m attacking a straw man here? You think I’m devising a distorted picture of the collectivist Left and their allies? You think there’s some still-powerful rebellion, on the political Left, against the State, that can put a million people on the street to protest a specific fascist program of that big power? Where is it?

What was it, really, even in 1968? If the Vietnam war had been fought with no draft, with a volunteer army, a large part of the 1960s wouldn’t have happened at all.

As the 1970s droned on into the 80s, a rapprochement was achieved between the citizens and the police. More and more, the Left came to believe the whole idea of rebellion against the State was an old delusion. It was something people like Camus and Sartre had written about. It was really a European thing, an abstract philosophical pose.

Once the dust and the smelly underwear of the 1960s had been cleared away, the real State Op came into being. Encourage, in every way possible, crime and criminals; and then come in behind that with an answer to the horrific threat: cops.

Irresistible. On the streets, in the newspapers, on television, enact crime after crime after crime…and then promote the only answer: cops. More cops. More cops with bigger and better weapons.

Disarm everybody and leave the police and the FBI and the military and numerous other government agencies with the only guns.

Does this excuse the actual perpetrators of street crimes? No, of course not. In fact, it makes them more guilty, because they’re aiding and abetting a much larger plan. I’m not here to excuse a man who picks up a gun and shoots somebody. I’m spelling out context:

Seed the whole country with violence-inducing toxic psychiatric drugs and you will get plenty of crime. Which is exactly what has happened. All the way from Ritalin (cheep speed) to the SSRI antidepressants, to the brain-hammer anti-psychotics, the drug companies and their allied psychiatrists have been creating killings.

Allow American street gangs to work for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, while providing those cartels with US government protection as they sell tons of heroin and cocaine and crack all over the country, and you will get plenty of crime.

Pour billions of dollars into “rehabilitating” inner cities and stand by while the money disappears and is stolen, dedicate funds to programs that have no chance of working, stop genuine grass roots movements to build vast urban farms and provide free food and a sense of community, and you will get plenty of crime.

These and other strategies are the actions of a war to expand crime, to necessitate massive intervention by the State. This is an Op.

Our current leader, after similar mouthpieces like Bush and Clinton, is the one man who couldn’t possibly be on board with the Op. Barack Obama. He couldn’t possibly be doing his part to destabilize the whole society. He couldn’t. Which is exactly why he is the president of the United States now. Because he seems to stand for something better. But he doesn’t. He is definitely part of the Op.

But if he really did stand for something better, he could do several things, by executive order, that would detonate a real revolution in this country. Three crazy wild out-of-left field things, just for starters.

Declare and wage an all-out war on drug cartels and their sub-contracted domestic gangs.

Kick off a huge—and I mean huge—genuine urban farming program in every city in America. Free, clean, non-GMO food for the poor, grown by the poor, shared by the poor. The ramifications of such a program, carried out swiftly, would be astonishing on every level.

And attack, with a vengeance, Big Pharma and their psychiatric drugs.

What???

Huh???

The baffled response to such a program illustrates just how deep the brainwashing in this country goes.

And some people would say, “If Obama stood up and did those things, he’d be killed tomorrow.”

That’s getting us closer to the truth. But it would be senseless to stand up alone. He would need allies. Lots of them. Where would he find them? (Assuming he would launch this three-pronged program…a ludicrous assumption.)

Where in the familiar circles of power would any president find allies to turn things around?

Nowhere.

And that’s exactly why rebellion against the State isn’t just some old crusty abstract idea.

That’s why decentralization of power in America, at all levels, is THE counter-agenda. Intentional communities, nullification of unconstitutional federal laws, boycotts against corporations like Monsanto, alternative news sources, growing your own food, local parents threatening school boards to back off forcing psychiatric drugs down the throats of their children, home schooling, etc., etc.

Rendering every citizen weaponless, while at the same time giving the police every possible weapon and surveillance tool, is a solution in the same way that closing your eyes and jumping into a big barrel and pulling down the lid over your head is a solution.

300 million barrels with TV sets and smart phones is exactly what the State Corporatists are pushing.

The political Left promoted rebellion against the State as long as they saw themselves outside in the cold. But when they began to realize that they were, in fact, becoming the State, with all the power of the federal government, they dropped the idea of genuine rebellion like a hot potato. They praised big government, they assured everybody it was the solution, not the problem.

They shed bottom-up revolution because they were top-down.

There are lots of old Lefties who have been working to stop GMOs. When Obama signed the Monsanto Protection Act the other day, they paused and pondered. They began to realize they’ve been caught in a squeeze play. Their man, the president, isn’t who they thought he was. Not at all.

This disaffection is a familiar theme: outsiders feel solidarity in their revolution; then their leaders become insiders; then the ideals vanish, leaving the foot soldiers in the lurch.

Down through history, this scenario has played out countless times, in every conceivable organization that became big, bigger, and biggest. But history isn’t our strong suit. If a teacher really wanted to educate his college students, he’d put together a course on this very subject: The Carrot and the Stick.

The promise of something better, announced from a perch or pulpit of leadership; and what eventually happened to that promise.

What happens is a grand reversal. The very force that is being fought against eventually becomes the “guardian of the Good” and the supreme ruler.

The cadre who once railed against the rise of the police state is now dealing, not pot, but the surveillance of every phone call, email, text, computer keystroke, and purchase in this country. They’re dealing the TSA and the war in Afghanistan. They’re dealing covert ops in the Middle East and executing regime change, using thugs and terrorists. They’re bailing out mega-corporations and banks. They’re buying billions of rounds of ammo. They’re appointing people to hold the door open for Monsanto. They’re using psychiatry to drug the population. They’re spraying heavy metals in the sky. They’re presiding over and sustaining the economic disaster. They’re funding the transhuman future.

They’re doing all this while continuing to mouth the ideals they once swore to uphold.

In the words of the 1960s, they’re working for the Man.

The Man is the group of elite Globalists who have always followed the same plan: put the management of the planet under one roof.

To accomplish this Globalist aim, every honest cop and effective cop and idealistic cop and indifferent cop and corrupt cop will have to be turned into a faceless pig with a weapon pointed against his own people.

These “former rebels” who now rule the roost are saying, “Today, the pigs work for us. We tell them what to do. Just love the pigs and everything will be okay. You don’t need to own a gun. It’s all good. Just keep your eyes straight ahead and march into the future.”

Who would have thought rebels of bygone days would be staging their own version of neocon glory?

Anyone with a grain of sense.

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at:

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